In the game of StarCluster, you play civilians in the cluster, of any type, employed by a company which you construct to suit your own purposes. You can play Troupe style, with each player having more than one character, or standard single characters. Your company might be actors traveling in a showboat to backward colonies, or resource extractors stealing valuable hardwoods from a virgin planet, or merchanters trading from planet to planet, or insurance adjusters investigating a rash of spaceship accidents, or detectives unravelling bizarre crimes in a seedy city flushed with neon.

The League of Sastras, Vantors, Humans, and Tagris - or SaVaHuTa - And the Diasporan Community - or DC - are military-trading alliances, not nations. Their members are worlds, not people. Alien worlds can possibly be members, but the group or GM must decide how common this practice is. Humans came to the Cluster 500 years ago in slower than light ships, fleeting an unimaginable catastrophe in their home system. Now they are the dominant species in the Cluster.

Technology is very advanced in the Cluster. Active plasteel allows devices, vehicles, and even homes to change shape as required. Shrouds allow mental control over devices. Modifications, even radical ones, can be performed before or after birth. Soul Print locks open only to you, no matter what - or whose - shape you wear. Still, most humans in the Cluster are recognizably human. The weirder offshoots tend to drift to the fringes of society.

StarCluster gives you group-level tools, so you can create whatever you want to, and shape the setting and system to your own preferences. StarCluster 3 comes with four different resolution mechanic sub-systems - StarPerc roll-under percentage, StarKarma diceless, StarNova d6 pool add and roll-over, and StarRisk - where you can play it safe and get a mild success, or roll and chance failure to get a better result.

The Developer's Edition includes everything in the standard Edition, plus Developer's License, Developer's Appendix, and Powered by StarCluster 3 logo.

If you are interested in roleplaying Military characters in the Cluster, check out our sister game, In Harm's Way: StarCluster.

Starcluster has a lot of stuff going for it, and a lot against it. The system's pretty good, and I really enjoyed the setting in many ways, but there's a sort of do-everything mentality. This isn't necessarily bad, but you'll run into a lot of stuff [...]

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